From it’s humble beginnings in 1995 as a University pipe-dream to a globally commanding force of industry, google has come to be a household name. Their previous mantra (“Don’t be evil”) and plucky branding endeared them us and belied their rise to that of a true titan, but those days are long gone.
Today’s search industry landscape is mostly a landscape dominated by a few players, and even those offering alternatives are forced to compete by acting as little more than proxies for their competitors (At DuckDuckGo, for example, results are actually just aggregated from the other top players). To make matters more confusing, those dominating products work really well.
What’s the alternative? Well, competing with a quasi-monololy like google is a non-starter unless you’re a company on the order of Microsoft, and in that case we’re still beholden to a huge corporation. Most of us have no choice in the end. Challenging this system wil need to happen from the ground up among the users.
That being the case, why would anyone want to abandon the old stand-by, status quo search engines? Privacy is a big reason. More and more people are waking up daily to the realization that they’ve become a product instead of a client. In return for your excellent search results, you are hand-wrapped and sold ot advertisers as a lucrative little nugget of metadata. That’s not a very fair trade in the eyes of many…
Enter Presearch. In this blooming ago of bitcoin & blockchain technologies, it almost seems cliche, but why not have a search engine on a decentralized blockchain? The same benefits seen by bitcoin are ripe to help many industries, and search is a great place to take the lead.
Benefits include:
- No central authority indexing your search habits; all searches are routed through independently hosted nodes.
- Blockchain technology offers true privacy without the need to trust even a non-profit organization.
- Even in the early stages of building their index, quality is the top concern, so results are proxied from more established engines (again, though nodes, so your private metadata is not collected).
What is a node? Everyday people with a slightly technical mindset can install a local container application to offer our spare internet bandwidth and a small amount of computing power to route searches. In fact, I’m running a node on a slightly-busted laptop in my home right now. (Check out https://nodes.presearch.org for info on hosting a node). If that’s not simple enough, enterprising individuals like myself can assist with your hosting needs for very little cost (You can also be rewarded for hosting PRESEARCH nodes if you’re willing to stake a certain amount of their native crypto-currency).
As for me, I’ve started using Presearch as my default search engine and I won’t be looking back anytime soon. In fact, I’m looking forward to seeing what other industries blockchain will disrupt & improve next!
